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An OSS conundrum with many perspectives

“Even aside from the OSS impact, it illustrates the contrast between “bottom-up” planning of networks (new card X is cheaper/has more ports) and “top down” (what do we need to change to reduce our costs/increase capacity).”
Robert Curran.

Robert makes a really interesting point. Adding a new card type is a relatively common event for a big network operator. It’s a relatively minor challenge for the networks team – a BAU (Business as Usual) activity in fact. But if you follow the breadcrumbs, the impact to other parts of the business can be quite significant.

Your position in your organisation possibly dictates your perspective on the alternative approaches Robert discusses above. Networks, IT, planning, operations, sales, marketing, projects/delivery, executive – all will have different impacts and a different field of view on the conundrum. This makes it an interesting problem to solve – which viewpoint is the “right” one to tackle the challenge from?

My “solutioning” background tends to align with the top down viewpoint, but today we’ll take a look at this from the perspective of how OSS can assist from either direction.

Bottom Up: In an ideal world, our OSS and associated processes would be able to identify a new card (or similar) and just ripple changes out without interface changes. The first OSS I worked on did this really well. However, it was a “single-vendor” solution so the ripples were self-contained (mostly). This is harder to control in the more typical “best-of-breed” OSS stacks of today. There are architectural mechanisms for controlling the ripples out but it’s still a significant challenge to solve. I’d love to hear from you if you’re aware of any vendors or techniques that do this really well.

Top Down: This is where things get interesting. Should top-down impact analysis even be the task of an OSS/BSS? Since it’s a common / BAU operational task, then you could argue it is. If so, how do we create OSS tools* that help with organisational impact / change / options analysis and not just network impact analysis? How do we build the tools* that can:

Predict the rippling impacts

Allow us to estimate the impact of each

Present options (if relevant) and

Provide a cost-benefit comparison to determine whether any of the options are viable for development

* When I say “tools,” this might be a product, but it could just mean a process, data extract, etc.

I have the sense that this type of functionality falls into the category of, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should… build it into your OSS.” Have you seen an OSS/BSS with this type of impact analysis functionality built-in?